(photo by Dan Kitwood)This is how absurd it gets in climate alarmist politics. Considered Britain’s biggest CO2 polluter, Drax in North Yorkshire is suing the UK government after they have lost a lucrative contract when a media investigation revealed that they had stopped burning coal and are burning wood pellets from US forests as a “green” alternative to coal. The government had agreed to pay double for power generated this way, but withdrew the offer when it was made public that it was shipping biomass pellets 3,000 miles from North Carolina forests.

Environmentalists say endangered species, habitats, greenhouse gases.

Ministers have withdrawn their promise to guarantee profits for the part of the plant using biomass.

That wiped £400 million off the company’s share price and prompted the company to start legal action.

A lead author of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has publicly disassociated himself with the report after government officials forced him to change a highly influential scientific report on climate change to suit their own political interests.

Harvard professor Robert Stavins said that officials representing “all the main countries and regions of the world” insisted on changes to the report in a late night meeting at a Berlin conference center two weeks ago. Three quarters of the original version ended up being deleted.

Professor Stavins’ chapter of the 2,000 page document concerned ways countries can cooperate to reduce carbon emissions. He is a Harvard professor of Business and Government, and was one of two coordinating lead authors of a key report published by the IPCC’s Climate Change report earlier this month.

The theory is that IPCC reports are scrupulously independent and give scientific advice to governments around the world to help them shape policy. The “Summary for Policymakers” is a condensed version that the world media and politicians rely on for evidence that what they want to do is actually a good idea. Governments of all sizes have enthusiastically embraced global warming as something which they can “fight” to impress their citizens, and the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ provides the evidence. It is the “consensus” that warmists embrace.

Professor Stavins told the Daily Mail that he had been especially concerned by what happened at a special ‘contact group.’ Two Summary authors were surrounded by 45 or 50 government officials who made clear that “any text that was considered inconsistent with their interests and positions in multilateral negotiations was treated as unacceptable.” Many of these officials were themselves climate negotiators working on a new treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol in negotiations set to conclude next year.

Professor Stavins said, “This created an irreconcilable conflict of interest. It has got to the point where it would be reasonable to call the document a summary by policymakers, not a summary for them, and it certainly affects the credibility of the IPCC. The process ought to be reformed.”

Two weeks earlier, Sussex University’s Professor Richard Tol demanded that his name be removed from the summary of an earlier volume of the full IPCC report. He said:

The IPCC does not guard itself against selection bias and ‘group think’ —Alarmism feeds polarization. Climate zealots want to burn heretics of global warming on a stick.

The IPCC has always been a political operation. It was founded to be a political operation. Look up Maurice Strong on Google. The IPCC does not do science themselves, but assembles reports from chosen scientists. It has been often criticized over the years, but the Summaries are over-relied on by policy makers.

Our own government has been involved in wind farms; solar arrays; deepwater drilling; offshore drilling; fracking; pipelines; refineries; coal mining, processing, transportation and fueling power plants; electric cars; regulations on everything from lightbulbs to shower heads and toilets; gasoline additives, ethanol, biofuel; mpg regulations; solar cell manufacturing; and environmental battles over everything previously mentioned with endangered species thrown in as a bonus. The funding, grants, contracts, subsidies, tax credits involved add up to enormous unknown totals wasted on changes in climate that many consider a natural process not amenable to human control. And there has been no warming at all in 17 years and 8 months.